


Homecoming

by ecphrasis



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Cultural Differences, Eventual Romance, Eventual Smut, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, Hurt/Comfort, Marriage Law Challenge, Mutual Pining, Mutually Unrequited, Pureblood Politics (Harry Potter), Sharing a Bed, Slow Burn, kind of
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-03
Updated: 2020-05-06
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:20:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23996656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ecphrasis/pseuds/ecphrasis
Summary: Wicked plots, secret organizations, and ancient spells might just draw Hermione back into the world she thought she’d left for good... and towards a man she never dreamed she could love. Not Epilogue compliant. Vaguely Marriage-Lawish. I’ll probably upgrade the rating to E as the story progresses.
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Draco Malfoy
Comments: 8
Kudos: 21





	1. Chapter One

**Chapter One**

_All I want is a less remote, less dangerous place_  
 _in which to weep and repent in safety and peace._  
Ovid, _Tristia_. trans. David Slavitt

It was raining when Hermione stepped from Massey Room into the little garden, and then slipped out the back gate and down Magdalen Street. She’d long ago waterproofed her bags and clothes, but her hair was nicely done up because of her examination, and she had been too fretful to bother casting a staying charm earlier, so she conjured an umbrella and hurried down the sodden street towards her favorite café, a little place owned by an old Algerian woman, whose English was pleasantly accented by her native French, and whose scones were always piping hot and served with extra cream. 

“Hermione!” Maisah exclaimed when she entered the cafe. She wiped her hands on her apron and embraced her warmly. “How was it, dear?”

“I passed,” Hermione said. The critical part of her reminded her that she had yet to receive the results of her written exam, which had been delayed due to one grader’s wife’s accident, and that she might have faltered in her analysis of Xenophon’s reflections of xenia in the Anabasis, or of Galen’s use of legal terminology in his medical treatises, or of Cicero’s conception of elderly men in the ideal state, but the more rational part of her soothed those anxieties. Hermione Granger had not failed an examination since she fell off her broomstick her first year at Hogwarts. 

“Congratulations, young lady!” Maisah said, embracing her again. “Your tea is my pleasure today; I’m very happy for you.”

“You don’t have to-“ Hermione started, but the woman hushed her. 

“You bought enough to keep me in business for the next century writing that thesis; I may as well let you have a free cup. I’m sure that as England’s newest Masters in Classical Philology you’ll find time and money to buy many more.”

“You’re an angel,” Hermione said. “Thank you.” The woman smiled at her, smiled genuinely, openly, and Hermione smiled back. Maisah vanished to prepare the promised tea, and Hermione sat by the window, watching the students of Oxford scurrying by in the lightening rain, shielding books with their bodies, or else half-running beside their friends. 

Hermione had friends, of course. There was Phoebe Wong, who was writing her dissertation on Roman playwrights’ representation of internal structures, especially Plautus, especially in Miles Gloriosus. She was always down to chat, especially if the conversation involved ekphrastic architecture. 

And then there was Amber Staufhaus, a brilliant German girl who’d graduated three years early, who had an eye for ancient prosody, who’d sworn to unravel the mystery of Saturnian meter before she died. So far, she hadn't made much progress, but she had taken to reciting the few remaining remnants of Gnaeus Naevius with exceptional gusto, trying to find some meaningful pattern behind the verse. 

And of course there was Jerome Days, American, brash, overconfident, but not often wrong, the first member of his family to graduate from college. He hadn’t touched Latin before his second year of university. 

But she had never run through the rain with them, she had never spent late nights giggling over what the young found amusing. She’d never dared them to swim in one of Oxford’s shallow, oxbow rivers, or gone with them to celebrate the holidays, or cried about the past with them. 

And Harry and Ron would be happy for her, but they didn’t understand her study of ancient magical systems, especially not through the lens of the Indo-European oral tradition. They were out catching wicked wizards, and she was playing muggle, pretending she wasn’t the girl who saved the world, the brains of the Golden Trio. They hadn’t even understood when she went back to Hogwarts for that final year. 

They hadn’t been there to comfort her when she slid away from her studies to weep in the Head Girl’s bathroom until her eyes were red and her nose was chafed, and her chest felt like sobs would split it apart. They hadn’t felt the half-heartedness of her essays, the scarce attention she paid in all her subjects, her spiraling self-destruction, her growing isolation and depression. It wasn’t until old Binns summoned her to correct an error (an error!) in her paper on Indo-Aryan magical poultices, and offered to teach her Sanskrit (as an accessory to her Greek and Latin) and she’d had to admit that she only knew French, that she’d found something to cling to. The classical languages were logical, sensible, distracting, difficult. Binns taught her cases and syntax and exceptions, and she threw herself into their study. She couldn’t hear the dead dying when she was chanting the rules for triggering the subjunctive. 

And after her year at Hogwarts, she enrolled at St Andrews, still in Scotland, still close enough to Hogwarts that she could pop up and visit with McGonagall, and pretend it was for continuing specialized transfiguration. She’d specialized in Greek and Latin, and written a paper that she was selected to present at a real, actual philological conference, and then won a translation contest, and she was invited to Oxford to tour the department and meet the graduate advisor, and she’d rejected her offers to study magic at a higher level, and she’d chosen to chip away at the mysteries of magic from the muggle side, through the lens of serious, rigorous, academic study. 

And now, with her Master’s, she had to make that choice again. Muggle or magic? Woman or wizard? Would she pursue her doctorate in Greek magical systems, or would she return to the world that had very nearly killed her? 

The old scar on her arm itched, she scratched it absently. Had it ever been a choice? Had she ever truly been presented with an inroads to Wizarding Britain, or had it all been an illusion, a trick, a vanishing act from reality? In Oxford, no one tried to kill her for her blood. She mingled and she studied and she was happy. 

“Hermione?” Maisah asked. “Are you crying?” She was. Because it was May 2nd, and it hadn’t gotten easier, as the years passed. 

“Sorry,” she said, wiping her tears away. 

“They would be so proud,” the woman said, intuiting that she mourned some deeper loss. Hermione has often sensed the remnants of something magical in her blood. The woman’s certainty brought out her French frisson. “You know, my grandfather used to say all happiness is bittersweet, and we’re better for it if we find the sadness in the joy. Congratulations, Hermione. Drink your tea and be proud of yourself, as you know they would be for you.” Hermione smiled a watery smile, and sipped. The tea was piping hot, black and rich. The bell above the door rang. 

“Welcome in,” Maisah called. “What can I get for you, dear?”

“I’m sorry, I’ve yet to decide,” the smooth, arch voice said. It was less prideful, less asinine, but still it bore the easy weight of aristocracy. Hermione dropped her teacup, and it shattered on the oak floorboards, and Maisah and Draco Malfoy looked to her. She leapt up, and before she quite realized what she intended, she stood up, jostling the table. 

“Hermione!” Maisah cried. 

“Sorry,” she murmured. “Sorry, Maisah. I’ll pay for it.”

“It’s my fault,” Draco said. “I startled her. Do you have a cloth?”

“I’ll get one,” Maisah said. 

“What are you doing here?” Hermione hissed. 

“It’s a free country,” Draco said. 

“Small thanks to you.” She regretted the words as soon as she said them, and she laughed to prove to him that she was only joking. 

“Come now,” he said. “We’re better friends than that.”

“I told you when we graduated from Hogwarts that I was done with the Wizarding world for a while.”

“I wouldn’t have come if it wasn’t urgent,” he said. “I need to talk to you, okay?”

“Draco-“

“This is serious, Hermione. Please, you have to at least listen.”

“What about Maisah?” Wordlessly, Draco moves his index fingers counterclockwise, waggled it, and crooked it. Her teacup mended itself on the floor. He’d spent a year studying learn wandless magic from the Canadian First Nations, and she was suitably impressed. “Alright,” she said. “I suppose I can spare one hour.”

She led him from the coffee shop to her small flat, overlooking a communal garden and a parking lot. 

She let him in, resetting her wards automatically, and he looked around. 

“The word in the Ministry is that you’ve gone full muggle,” he said, as she opened her window to allow the scent of fresh rain to infiltrate the flat. 

“Hardly,” she said. “I’m still practicing, just different spells. Earth magic, ancient stuff, reconstructed, mostly. Indo-European, but I’ve dabbled in proto-Semitic incantations. I really need a herd of horses, but those are difficult to come by.” Draco didn’t laugh. “What’s wrong?”

“Do you still get the Prophet?”

“Merlin, no. If I never read that rag again it’ll be a bit too soon.”

“This is tomorrow’s edition.” She didn’t ask how he had it fifteen hours early, she knew the answer. The Malfoy name still had benefits, even after everything. 

_Ministry unveils sweeping new law in honor of Hogwarts Heroes Day._

And then, the byline.   
_Marriage and Procreation Encouragement Act is designed to address drastically fallen fertility rates._

The latest minister, some bureaucrat who’d been conveniently Imperiused for the majority of the war, waved portentously from above the fold. 

“What is this?” She asked. 

“What it looks like. The Ministry’s been reeling recently. We’ve had four ministers recalled in a year-“ 

“The Year of Four Emperors is what I’ve heard it named,” she said. There were a few wizards in Oxford, though most had been purged by Voldemort’s Deatheaters. Wizarding scholars tended to be muggle, and to sympathize with the unmagical. She tended to avoid them either way, and they, mercifully, let her be. 

“And there is a dearth of magical folk. So many have emigrated to the US, or to the former colonies, or even farther afield, that last year only fourteen magical children were born in the entire country. So the ministry invented a solution, helmed by none other than Dolores Jane Umbridge’s nephew, the current twat minister: the MPEA. All unwed witches and wizards will be entered into a random lottery tomorrow at twelve, and their matches will be announced at one. The Ministry will tighten its grip on England, and anyone who objects will be removed from the magical community entirely, forever.”

“I want nothing to do with marriage or the ministry,” she said. “It’s nothing to me if I can’t access Diagon Alley. There’s always France, or Germany, or Italy, or Greece, or Nigeria, or Japan, or anywhere else except here.”

“Haven’t you read about the newest extradition treaty? They pushed it through on the pretense of rounding up death eaters who escaped, but Luna warned me they had other motives. If you enter a Wizarding community after this edict goes into effect, the authorities will be legally obligated to hand you over. Defiance leads to a minimum of one year in Azkaban, and Hermione, you’re mentioned specifically.” He pointed to the text, and she read Ms Hermione Granger, having completed her exotic course of study, is pleased to announce her engagement to ___________. A part of her was surprised they hadn’t preselected a match. 

“What’s this really about?” She asked. 

“It’s the Thaumazdo Faction,” he said, and the way he said it made her shiver, although the word held only its Attic Greek meaning for her. “I see you don’t know that either; you have been isolated. I can’t talk about it here, we need proper warding to discuss them, and there simply isn’t time. Hermione, I have important work in the Ministry, I cannot afford to be wed to some spy for Duncan Lettier’s crew, but more importantly, you should not be married to some wizard who will invoke the old rules to keep you from your studies.” Wizarding marriage law had never modernized, and she knew that the husband retained significant contol over his wife. It was one reason so many women had been forgiven their involvement in Voldemort’s war the first time - they claimed to have been bound to his service by their husbands. If she was wed to a man who disliked muggle studies, he could simply publicly command her to stop, and social pressure would force her hand. The thought made her want to throw something out a window. The critical part of her helpfully offered up the suggestion of her own body. 

“I have a proposition for you.” Draco finished. And Hermione, feeling her life once again spinning far out of her control, sank into her armchar and sat with her arms around her knees, deep in thought. “I also have fourteen horses in Scotland,” he said. She could tell this was meant to lighten the mood, to relieve her of some of her plaguing doubts, but she really did need the horses for her research. And the Prophet was clear in its pronouncement of the law, and she knew Draco, had grown friendly of him during their year at Hogwarts. 

“Once we get this sorted out,” she said. “I’m divorcing you, and I’m going to take your horses as my settlement.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “So you’ll marry me?”

“Yes,” she said. “There’s a chapel in town, I know the minister. She’ll grant our marriage license.”

“Excellent,” Draco said. And Hermione shut her eyes and wondered when she’d be permitted a life close to normalcy. 

—————————————-

The sun had almost finished setting when Hermione led her erstwhile enemy from her flat, down the cobbled lane, and up into another street, towards the little, ornamental chapel that tourists enjoyed gawking at, and that she irregularly attended. Being Anglican again was almost comforting, it was safe and sane, but she did not know how to reconcile her own existence with that of God’s, so she did not try. Blessed are the peacemakers. 

She knocked on the door, expecting it to be locked, expecting, irrationally, to be thwarted by a dead body. 

“Did they catch any death eaters with the extradition treaty?” She asked. 

“Three,” he said. “All fled to Australia.” Her bones shivered with a new, icy fear. Had they found her parents, after all? As Head Boy and Head Girl, she and Draco had spent a lot of time together, talking over past grievances. They’d come to terms with their old enmity, they’d learned how to be grown up. Once she’d found him crying in the astronomy tower, and she knew that once he’d found her up there too, standing with her back to the stiff breeze, imagining how Dumbledore must have felt as he fell. Because after that, after she’d considered and cast aside the idea of jumping, McGonagall had invited her up for tea, and had asked her to talk about the war. She knew Draco must have told someone she needed help, because she would not have known where to begin asking for it. 

“Did they-“ she began. She’d told Draco one night, fueled by drink and guilt and terrible loneliness, what steps she’d taken to save her parents. How she’d effectively made herself an orphan, how she’d vanished from their lives and sent them away, just as they’d sent her away to boarding school seven years earlier. 

“You made them untraceable,” he said. “But I didn’t see any muggle reports of double murder.” So he had thought to look. She knocked again, and the minister, Amy Pemberly, large, vigorous, muggle, finally answered. 

“Hermione!” She cried out. “I missed you the last few weeks.”

“Sorry,” she said. “Been busy with my thesis, you know?”

“Oh yeah? Had your defense yet?”

“Today, actually. Listen, Amy, could we come in?”

“Sure, if you’d like. Who’s this, Hermione?”

“My fiancé,” 

“Her friend,” Draco said, and they both paused and laughed awkwardly. The coil of dread in her stomach tightened slightly. “Draco Malfoy,” he said. “It’s a pleasure.”

“I had no idea you were engaged,”

“It’s a long story,” she said. “Listen, Amy, we need to be married.”

“Now?” She asked. 

“Ideally,” Hermione said. 

“Alright, I have an hour before the women’s group. Congratulations.”

“For?” Hermione asked. 

“Well,” Amy said. “The baby.”

“Oh,” she said. “No, no, it’s not like that. I’m not- we haven’t-“

“It’s alright,” Amy said. “God welcomes everyone to him, in every circumstance. Please, come in, and stand either side of the alter.“

“I’ve never been to a muggle wedding,” Draco murmured, and Hermione felt the scar on her arm itching, itching, itching. He’d grown a bit taller in the intervening years, his boyish face was no longer so round and youthful, he had the beginnings of creases near his eyes, and his shoulders were no longer Seeker-slender. She knew she’d changed too, her hair was shorter, her frame slighter, her whole body shrunk. Her scars stood livid against her flesh, and she did not sleep without fearing her dreams. Harry and Ron had made their way into the world, wizards and aurors and heroes, she’d slipped back into her books until she was as slight as a single page. 

“The vows are different, but they nevertheless rely on old reduplicative bonding. They’re still tinged with magic.”

“Interesting,” he said. “You always were the best at History of Magic.”

“I was the best at everything.” She joked, knowing that her younger self might well have believed it. 

“Not potions,” he said. “Not Defense Against the Dark Arts either.”

“Or divination,” she admitted. “But everything else.” He laughed, and having unlocked the doors to the sanctuary, Amy admitted them. Hermione watched Draco observing the chapel, and felt her heart warm as he gaped upwards at the high ceiling. She remembered seeing it for the first time, and feeling some hope that life was more than what it had been. So far, it had proved less. 

“Alright,” Amy said. “Do you have your service books? Good, now repeat after me.” She invoked the trinity, then read the story of the wedding at Cana, where Jesus turned water into wine. Hermione’d spent hours mulling over the religious implications of that simple transformation. 

Draco seemed unsettled by the human vows, but he’d mellowed since childhood, and he made no protests. They signed their names in a register, and the minister promised to file their wedding certificate early the next morning, and then they were released, husband and wife, to make of the world what they would. 

“That wasn’t much how I expected,” Draco said. “You’re right about the ritual having magical remnants, but it’s so empty. A Wizarding ceremony is long and contains a lot of sacred oaths, and the older the family, the more numerous and intricate.”

“Well, if you’d prefer-“

“No,” he said. “Not if we want to be able to divorce with any ease. The bonds make separation tricky. Is there anywhere we can eat here? I’m starving.”

“Do you have muggle money?” She asked. “I forgot my purse at home, but I can run back.”

“Of course I have money.” Draco opened his wallet to show her about ten thousand pounds, and she slapped her hand over it, and looked around to make sure no one’d noticed. 

“Draco,” she said. “Have you ever been to the real world before?”

“I like to think this world is the unreal one,” he said with a laugh. 

“There’s a quaint Italian restaurant two blocks down, if you’d like.”

“Sounds excellent,” he said. He paused, and she felt a question hovering on the edge of his tongue. “Hermione,” he said. “Are you going to any Hogwarts Heroes Day celebrations?”

“Ron and Harry are going back to Hogwarts. It’s the seventh year since the war, so it’s fitting and nice and symmetrical, but being amongst crowds of witches and wizards-“

“Yeah,” he said. “I think the people who celebrate it most were people who weren’t involved.”

“I can’t sleep without seeing the faces of the dead,” she admitted. He took her hand and squeezed it, just as Harry would have, were he not currently drunk with Ginny, exalting in victory. 

“I’m sorry,” he said. “For everything. For what I did, and-“

“You were a child, Draco,” she said. “I can’t blame you for believing what you were raised to believe. You figured it out eventually.”

“Too late,” he said, and she shook her head. 

“You saved Harry when we were caught in the forest, you helped Luna, you refused to kill Dumbledore. Without you, everything might have gone quite differently.”

“It feels so long ago,” he said. 

“It still doesn’t feel real. I think of the Weasleys and have to remember Fred is gone, see a photographer gesturing in the park and I think of Colin, a woman with blue hair shivers in my periphery and I imagine it’s Tonks, I hear a man’s happy laugh and I’m convinced it’s Lupin, and it never is, it’s always a stranger instead of a friend, and I just feel so-“ she paused. In all her many languages she could not think of a single word to describe the aloneness, the sorrow, the shame and the guilt and the sick fear that it hadn’t ended, would never end, that she’d wake up a prisoner and find this mournful existence was all a dream. 

“Unreal,” he said. She nodded, and he sighed, and they walked together into the night, and stuffed themselves with Italian food, and Draco told her the latest gossip from the Ministry. She’d forgotten how ordinary his job was, just another functionary greasing the wheels of power, another cog in Britain’s magical machine marching slowly towards... what, exactly? A soft totalitarian state? All wizards being pressed into the service of some larger plan? Thaumazdo echoed in her mind, to the swift hoof beats of a cantering horse. She needed the herd for her experiment. 

He paid for dinner in cash, and held her arm on the way out, and she felt again her latent jealousy of the girls who understood how to simper and smile and coax boys into love, of Pansy and Lavender and Pavarti and Cho and even Ginny, who always had admirers and hangers on, and knew how to keep them. Hermione hadn’t kissed a boy she liked since Victor Krum, and she hadn’t kissed anyone at all in at least two years. Draco was her friend, certainly, and she was grateful to him for warning her about the law, but she knew he had no eye for her, no more than anyone else. She chastised herself for self pity on the anniversary of more than sixty deaths. 

“I can help you pack, if you’d like,” Draco said. “We should get to Scotland before noon tomorrow, so if they send inquisitors we’ll have some time to prepare.” She saw in her mind’s eye Dolores Jane Umbridge, peering through her disgusting pink glasses, searching for any sign of mischief or disorder. 

“I was going to leave for the summer anyway,” she said. “I need time to decide whether or not to pursue my doctorate. I’ve been accepted here, and a school in Germany, and two in the States, but a part of me is tired of research.”

“Hermione Granger, tired of research?” Draco asked. “Those are words I never thought I’d hear.”

“All work and no play,” she said, laughing despite herself. 

“Not a lot of wizards study muggle things,” Draco said. “Our worlds are so far apart.”

“Perhaps they weren’t always,” she said, thinking of her hunch, her supposition, the reconstructed proto-Indo-European spell she’d found tucked away in a nineteenth century handbook on Germanic ablauts. “I don’t have much I’ll take with me, provided I can come back in a few weeks’ time.”

“Of course,” he said. “I’ll ask Deena to make a portkey for you, so we don’t have to fly all the way back.”

“Flying?” She asked. “You came on a broomstick?”

“I’d never been to Oxford before, so I couldn’t apparate.” 

“I don’t fly,” she said, flatly. “I haven’t in years.”

“Well, I suppose we’re close enough to Wiltshire that I can apparate us both, provided you won’t have too much luggage.”

“I’ll pack light,” she said. She let him into her apartment and reset her wards, and she found what she needed. Her book on Indo-European meters, her ancient Latin incantations, her finished thesis on Greek conceptions of magical ability, and her research notebook. She gathered up her clothes, and compressed all her possessions into her old Hogwarts trunk. It had seemed so large when she was eleven, but now it seemed petite and battered. She wondered if, had she a time turner powerful enough to reach back to her twelfth year, she would tell bright-eyed little Hermione to go to Hogwarts, or to run away as fast as possible, and never look back. 

“Is that all you need?” He asked. She looked around, grabbed another wayward book, and nodded. 

“Where’d you leave your broom?” He patted his coat pocket in answer. 

“Nimbus Eclipse: the transformable broom for the transitory wizard.” She smiled again, and he took her case in one hand and her arm in the other, and they fell forwards through space, whizzing through the nothingness, and her stomach lurched and she felt herself pulled groundward, and then they were standing in the dank dungeons of Malfoy Manor. “That’s odd,” he said. “You shouldn’t have been able to get past the wards, we ought to have ended up outside the boundary line.”

“A good deal of my blood was spilled across your flagstones,” she said, the scar on her arm itching. The dungeons had not changed since she’d last seen Luna and Ollivander rotting in them. “Your house absorbed me, and so cannot repel me. It’s sympathetic magic, you know. Basic stuff, but Bellatrix had no head for causality.”

“I suppose at least I won’t have to redo the spellwork now we’re wed,” he said. It was a feeble joke, but she had seen the agonized look on his face when she mentioned her maiming, so she smiled at him. His hair was long, white-blond, but he had more of Narcissa’s quiet beauty in him than of Lucius’ rigid severity. “I hate the dungeons at night; let’s go up and I’ll show you to the guest room, and I’ll ask Deena to draw you a bath.”

“I don’t accept service from house-elves,” she said, prepared for the shocked amusement and the head shaken at her oddness, but Draco only nodded. 

“Mine are employees, not servants. I forced my father to put that provision in his will, before he died. No house-elf can ever be bound in service of Malfoy Manor again.”

“How progressive,” she said. Even Ron had a house-elf, and even Harry still occasionally mocked her when they recollected the SPEW. Draco shrugged as though her words made him uncomfortable, and he let her out from the dank recesses of the house, up into the moonlit hall. It gleamed silver and everything lay still and peaceful. Beyond the great window, trees moved in sibilant waves to a faint wind, and the grouting between each stone glimmered where the gelid moon struck it. She had forgotten the extraordinary vibrancy of the Wizarding world. 

Draco led her up a scrolled staircase, down another corridor bathed in moonlight, and showed her to an ample, expansive room that was very neutrally decorated, as though designed to give the least amount of impression to an observer peering in. 

“Is it alright?” He asked. “It’ll just be for the night, I need to find the old portkey for the Scottish estate and we can leave shortly after breakfast.”

“It’s perfect,” she said. “Thank you.” He looked at her a moment, and she wondered at how far they had come, that they could be so cordial seven years after his sworn liege lord tried to exterminate her and her friends like so much vermin. He broke the trance first. 

“You can call Deena if you need anything. My mother’s clothes are packed away in mothballs, but if you require anything to wear, we can dig it out.“ He turned to leave, and she felt compelled to speak, to fix the strange formality that had arisen. 

“Draco,” she said. The light caught on his cheekbones, and glimmered in his eyes. His robes were well-made, forest green and earth brown, well-suited to his frame and stature. He could have been a statue, a painted Greek kouros, standing in the moonlight. “Thank you for saving me from whatever the Ministry’s planning.”

“I can hardly have my research interrupted,” he deflected. After a pause he began again. “And I’d feel wrong, leaving you-“ but no more words were forthcoming. He left and shut the door behind him, and Hermione sank to the floor, her trunk beside her, worlds away from where she’d thought she’d be the previous morning. 

In Australia, a new day was dawning. 

Hermione went to bed. 

——————————

Draco Malfoy slumped against her shut door for a moment, his eyes shut against the darkness of the world, and then he moved on to his own bedroom, and put all his variegated, troubling thoughts from his mind. 


	2. Chapter Two

Chapter Two  
  
 _My heart melts. Or is it gnawed  
_ _the way ships in the harbor can have their ribs gnawed hollow  
by that mollusk whose name I can't remember that bores_  
 _from within so that seaworthy timbers have no longer hold,_  
 _and the ship founders. Or, better, think of that sea_  
 _itself and how its waves can hollow caves in the cliffs,_  
 _battering rock away. Or look how rust_  
 _will eat iron to lace. Or worms masticate pages_  
 _of books, reducing poetry to dust._  
 _And so, with me, my human heart that is not wood,_  
 _stone, iron, or even parchment, but mere_  
 _meat on which the sorrows raven until they have sated themselves._  
Ovid, _Epistulae Ex Ponto_ , trans. David Slavitt

Hermione awoke uncomfortably sweaty, wedged between a cream mattress and cream sheets, and it took her a moment to shake the nightmare from her mind and to place herself in Malfoy Manor, in a guest room. It took her another moment to recognize a house elf standing at the foot of her bed.  
  
“Morning Mistress Malfoy,” she said amiably. She blinked, the name not registering, then registering all at once, and she almost corrected the elf, but stopped herself when she remembered the Ministry’s incredibly invasive methods of ensuring compliance. She suspected that, in their absence, all of Draco’s staff would be interrogated.  
  
“Morning, Deena?” She hedged. The elf nodded, pleased.  
  
“I’ve come to help you dress and pack, Mistress.”  
  
“Oh,” she said. “That’s alright, I scarcely unpacked in the first place. Draco and I are leaving early.”  
  
“It’ll go faster then,” the elf said. “Master Malfoy said you’re welcome to any of Madam Malfoy’s possessions in her absence.” Hermione wondered where Narcissa had gone, after her husband’s death. Italy, she thought Draco had said, but maybe somewhere farther afield, like Slovakia or the Ukraine.  
  
“A comb would be helpful, actually,” Hermione said, digging through her trunk and realizing she had failed to bring one. The elf snapped her fingers and presented her with an ornate silver comb, at least three hundred years old, and polished to such a gleam that she could see her own distorted reflection in every facet of its surface. “Thank you,” she said. “It’s beautiful.”  
  
“I polish all the silver weekly,” Deena said, and Hermione smiled.  
  
“I can tell.” She touched the comb and felt the silken remnants of a smoothing charm, and the comb glided easily through her hair. Just like magic, she thought. Although her hair was knotted, she did not hit a single snarl. “Have you worked for the Malfoys long?” She asked, as the house-elf stripped the sheets from her bed and dug through her haphazard clothes to find something appropriate for travel.  
  
“Approaching fifty years now, Mistress Malfoy,” Deena said. “I came from Madam Malfoy’s family, my people have always served the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black.” The queasy prospect of giving house elves as gifts grated Hermione, and she wondered when and why Draco had decided that house-elf liberation was a worthy cause, not one for ridicule.  
  
“And you’re happy here?” Hermione asked. Deena fished out a summer dress, floral and knee length, and before Hermione could squeak, she’d removed her pajamas and forced the dress over her head. It was somewhat old and faded, but where she touched it, the vibrancy and color bounced back. The sunflowers went from yellow to bright orange, the background from light blue to periwinkle, and the neckline dropped and the waist tightened and the skirt lengthened, and Hermione felt joy, real actual joy, at Deena’s fluid conjuring, at her breathless, easy magic. She required no spells to do her work. She simply wished, and it was so.  
  
“Yes, Mistress,” Deena said. “Master Malfoy leaves us to our own devices, and he pays us handsomely. I love this family and I hope when you’re organizing the household you’ll-“  
  
“Oh, I’d never fire anyone!” Hermione burst out. “Don’t worry, I’m not changing staff.”  
  
“Let me know if you need anything else, Mistress,” Deena said, and she brushed her strange hands over Hermione’s hair, which instantly smoothed and curled itself into perfect ringlets.  
  
There was no mirror in the guest room, so Hermione stood in front of the airy window and tried to catch a glimpse of her reflection in the glass. She saw instead the vast green lawn, dotted with flowers, flowing, verdant, into a copse of beech trees, all bright leaves and beginning buds. A pair of albino peacocks minced along, pecking at the ground, and she laughed out loud at the utter absurdity, the ostentation, the color.  
  
She left her room, and shut the door behind her. The hallway stretched, and every window was open, permitting the warm spring breeze to loft through the house. The portraits on the walls watched her with open interest, and one old woman held up a hand to stop her. Hermione paused before her gilt frame, and stared into the woman’s eyes.  
  
“Are you the bride Draco has chosen?” She asked.  
  
“For the moment,” she said. "I'm Hermione Granger, we went to school together."  
  
“And what, pray tell, is a Granger?” The woman asked. “I know the Sacred Twenty-Eight Families, and a Granger is not among any of them.”  
  
“No,” Hermione said. “I’m Muggle-Born.” The portrait sent up a great, horrible wailing sound, and those on either side of her, and those across.  
  
“A mudblood? My Draco a blood-traitor?” The portraits rattled in their frames, and Hermione slipped down the hall and away from them, surprised by the sudden stinging tears in her eyes.  
  
She’d read the histories of his heritage when they’d first become friendly, forced into companionship by the fact that they were the heads of school, and also the only members of their class to remain for the eighth year. His lineage stretched back ten centuries, to the invasion of William the Conqueror in 1066, and flicking through his genealogy, she’d found tacit proof of muggle blood, and in no small quantities either. Before the Statue of Secrecy, the Malfoys had mingled freely with humans, and had done most of their business in the world of the unmagical.  
  
The walls of the mansion were a brighter grey than she’d ever seen in stone before.  
  
She made her way down the spiraling staircase, each step dark oak and plush carpet beneath her feet. The banister was artfully carved to look like a coiling pair of snakes, and they shifted slightly beneath her touch, as though tickled by the tips of her fingers. She could sense the broad outlines of the charm that gave them motion, she could almost find the rhythm of the spell in her head-  
  
But at the foot of the staircase, she saw the door to the rose garden was open, and the roses were blooming, and a breakfast more sumptuous than any ever served at Hogwarts was spread on a stone table in the sunlight. Draco turned at her footstep, and he smiled, and gestured to the seat.  
  
“Hermione,” he said. “You look-“  
  
“Draco,” she said. He was dressed more informally than she’d ever seen him, wearing riding breeches and a pressed green shirt and supple leather boots, absent his usual billowing robes. He had tied back his hair, but a few strands had fallen into his face, and he brushed them away with an unconscious flick of his wrist.  
  
“Good morning,” he said, and she sat. He pushed her chair in with the easy grace of one born to good manners and excessive wealth, and he sat across from her.  
  
“It is,” she said. “It’s stunning, the sun is so bright, and everything’s so, so beautiful.”  
  
“It’s a good-weather charm woven into the boundary stones,” he said. “Old magic. Armand Malfoy left some of himself in each of the four corners of the property, an eye, an ear, his nose, and his blood.” She could imagine the complex spellwork required to bind flesh to earth, but in the sunlight of the garden, she could only visualize how the flowers would look fully opened.  
  
“He must’ve been quite a sight,” she said, and Draco, pouring her a glass of sparkling blue juice, laughed.  
  
“Let’s just say there’s a reason we keep his portrait at the end of the south wing,” he said. She helped herself to a spoonful of sliced fruits, and to a perfectly fried egg, and tomato, and bacon, and toast, and avocado, and before she’d even taken a bite she knew it would be her best meal since her brief trip to Marseilles the previous summer. “Did you sleep well?” He asked. She nodded.  
  
“I did,” she said. “Your guest room is so comfortable.”  
  
“I’m glad,” he said. “I’ve made preparations for a two week trip. We can stay more or less time as you see fit, but two weeks is what’s generally expected for newlyweds, and I’ve got a lot of research to do in my archives in Scotland.”  
  
“I’m more excited than I thought I would be,” she said. “I’d forgotten how... the world’s so much more colorful here. I didn’t realize how different everything looked with magic.”  
  
“I hope you’ll come back eventually,” he said. “You’re too talented of a witch to leave the Wizarding world for muggles. You could have a job in any department of the Ministry you like, you could attend any university.”  
  
“Hogwarts was home for me,” she said. “But then, when we returned for the eighth year, it wasn’t.” He rubbed at his arm, at the faint discoloration that was the remnant of Voldemort’s mark, and he nodded.  
  
She ate her toast and listened to the wrens chirruping their three-bar songs all around her, and she heard in palimpsest his distant voice, and the excessive giggles of Crabbe and Goyle and Pansy and Zabini, all laughing at his taunt of mudblood Granger.  
  
———————-  
  
By mid-morning they’d finished their breakfast, and she’d forced Draco to take her on a tour of the grounds so she could see his peacocks more closely. They came when he whistled, and he took a bag of dried corn from his pocket and let her feed them from her hand, although they were greedy and quarrelsome and had to be pushed away when the food was finished.  
  
A movement in the woods caught her, and she peered in between the trees, expecting to catch sight of some swift-moving magical creature, perhaps a niffler or some subspecies of ground dragon or a hippogriff. Instead, as she moved under the shadowy overhang of the green branches, she saw in the dark recesses of the thicket, two reptilian creatures with great leathery wings and white, pupil-less eyes. One was large, about twice the size of a regular horse, and the other scarcely came up to her waist.  
  
“Oh,” she said.  
  
“Deena told me there’ve been thestrals on the estate,” Draco said at her shoulder. As her eyes adjusted to the light she saw the details of their bony bodies, night-black and skeletal, and their maws dripping with blood. The two creatures were devouring a spotted fawn with their gleaming fangs.  
  
“I haven’t seen one in years,” she said. The mother turned at her voice, and met her gaze evenly. She licked her razor-sharp beak clean of blood, and stood, relaxed, watching her foal tear out strips of meat and swallow them whole.  
  
“I’ve never seen a foal before,” Draco said. They stood for a moment, watching and being watched, and then a distant cry sounded, and mother and foal leapt upwards into the sky, winging northward, leaving their kill behind.  
  
“I’m surprised Voldemort didn’t make use of them,” she said. Draco shook his head ruefully, and the green-filtered light caught on his blond hair and made it shimmer.  
  
“He couldn’t see them.”  
  
“What do you mean?” Hermione asked. “Surely he saw them, he caused so much death-“  
  
“Yes,” Draco said. “Caused it. But you don’t have to just see death to see a thestral, you have to understand and accept it, and Voldemort could do neither. My father invited some Death Eaters over to observe a thestral migration, and Voldemort cast a Cruciatus on him, he was so furious. He completely denied that they existed.” The image of the thestrals in dark undergrowth lingered behind her eyes like an old stain that would not wash out. She imagined Voldemort, unable to see the winged horses, unable to accept death, and she felt the familiar stab of hatred and pity.  
  
They made their way out of the woods, and she found the peacocks waiting for her at the forest’s border, eyeing her with ravenous eyes.  
  
“Shoo!” Draco cried at the birds, and the male spread his albino tail feathers and minced away with dainty steps, towards two females sitting on a distant hedge. The female let out a disgruntled shriek and fluttered off. “Blasted birds,” he said. “Blaise Zambini was always so jealous of them, but they’re honest-to-Merlin the worst creatures in existence. You should hear them in the mornings when something sets them off; it’s like living in an aviary.”  
  
“They’re very pretentious,” she said, and he chuckled.  
  
“Everything we Malfoys do is pretentious. We have fourteen estates, home to treasures beyond the imagination, every room decked out in splendor. We’re one of the oldest Wizarding families in Britain. People learn our lineage as history.” He could have sounded like an arse, but he said it lightly, jokingly, and she had the feeling he was quoting something his father often said in his youth. She thought again of the names in his family tree, muggle names in their dozens, and yet, surprisingly, never a squib in all the family’s long history. Then again, squib records were unreliable at best, prone to emendation and elimination.  
  
“Weren’t you ever lonely, growing up in your fourteen estates and your secret treasure chambers?”  
  
“Often,” he said. “But I guess you’d know, since you were an only child too.” And a clumsy one, she thought. Always prone to breaking things, shattering glasses, setting fires, causing pots to boil over. She knew now they were merely the infant signs of her magical abilities, but they’d disturbed her parents to the point of sending her to a psychologist to see what exactly was wrong with her.  
  
“I had my books,” she said. She’d been reading before she was four, and she could still remember most of those early books, stories of fairies and mystery solvers and magic.  
  
“And I mine,” he said. “It’s strange, to think we grew up without ever reading a single book in common.”  
  
“Yet here we are now,” she said. The manor house, built from magically-quarried ninth century stone, soared up over the vibrant green lawn, gleaming in the sunlight. High, scudding clouds left little shadow trails like miniature mirages on the earth, and every drop of dew brilliantly reflected a rainbow. Hermione tried to imagine Voldemort striding over the grounds and could not. Intellectually, she knew the Manor had been home to a number of murders, but there was no occlusion, no pale shadow, no ghostly vapor of terror. There was only the good-weather charm and the white peacocks and the sunlight on old stone.  
  
As they approached the house, a large ministry owl, bearing the Prophet in its talons, dropped the paper on her head, then squawked in indignation and flew away, rising up on warm air currents, scarcely needing to flap its speckled wings. Draco bent to retrieve it, and indeed, it looked much the same as it had yesterday.  
  
Duncan Lettier waved from above the fold, his head shifting slightly to maintain eye contact with the reader.  
  
“Your name’s been nixed,” he said, handing the paper to her. She looked it over, and was relieved to see that some witch singer had been chosen to gossip about instead.  
  
“Mercifully,” she said. “I wish they wouldn’t drag me into their politics.”  
  
“You’re one of the three most famous wizards in all of England,” he said. “They have to talk about someone.”  
  
“But I’m not involved,” she said. “It’s not like I work for the Ministry, or have even been to the Ministry since the medal ceremony. If I never see that place again I’ll be happy.”  
  
“You did a great thing,” he said. “You’re a living hero. People are bound to be interested.”  
  
“It feels like a lifetime ago,” she said. Except she saw the dying every night when she tried to sleep, when she could not escape from the mangled twisting of their faces.  
  
“It was a different world,” he said. “Even during our eighth year, it felt distant. Ever since my father died, the time before just seems unreal.” She thought of Malfoy, peering into Harry Potter’s face, and she saw the recognition in his eyes, and she heard him lie to the Snatchers, boldly and without fear. She thought of taking Potions with him, watching his lightning-quick hands using mortar and pestle, or slicing, or stripping, or stirring, everything as natural as breathing, while she had to memorize the recipes and keep count of her clockwise and counterclockwise rotations. “We should get going,” he said. She met his eyes, and found herself their grey depths. She was reminded, irrationally, of an icy lake she’d seen as a very young child in the Alps. Her parents had taken her up into the mountains, and they’d gone ice-skating on water so transparent she could actually see the shadows of fish moving through the depths, and the more she stared, the deeper the lake became, and the more of it she comprehended. “I, um, have something for you,” he said. “Since we’re pretending to be married, you’ve got to have a ring. This was Armand Malfoy’s mother’s, and it’s always been in the family.”  
  
He offered her a graven silver box, inscribed with the words SANCTIMONIA•VINCIT•SEMPER. She lifted the lid, and saw a stunning silver ring shaped like an ouroboros, and inlaid with emeralds and white diamonds. She could sense its age, and the numerous, carefully crafted charms that protected it. The snake's eyes were gleaming rubies. She lifted the ring, and admired the early eighth century craftsmanship, and slid it over her finger.  
  
The pain was immediate, violent. She felt the wound start in her stomach and spread outwards, splitting her in two, cracking her rib cage with six sharp snaps, and she felt her arms and legs slough off from her body, and her eyes turn to liquid,  
  
And then Draco tugged the ring from her finger, and she lay gasping on his lawn, her body afire with agony worse than anything in her memory, except for Bellatrix’s knife pressed against her arm. Draco knelt beside her, and she saw he’d stained the knees of his riding breeches with grass, and he’d gotten mud on his shirt. His nose was bleeding, and she realized she must have struck him in her fit. She brought her hand up to her ribs and found, to her surprise, that they were whole.  
  
“What was that?” He asked.  
  
“Draco,” she said. If she wasn’t thankful for the breath in her lungs, she would have been furious at his simplicity, his childishness. “It’s hexed against mud bloods.”  
  
“Please,” he said. “Don’t call yourself that.”  
  
“Why not?” She asked. She tested her legs and found them sturdy, so she helped herself up, ignoring his proffered arm. “You certainly did when we were younger.”  
  
“I was wrong, I’m sorry,” he said. “I was awful as a child, and I hate myself for who I was, but the ring can’t be the problem. We have dark objects, cursed against the muggle-born, but Armand’s mother owned the ring, and she was a muggle. There’s no way-“  
  
“Draco,” she said. “Your bit of family inheritance just tried to rip me apart from the inside. Sanctimonia Vincit fucking Semper, it says it right on the box. Purity conquers all. I’ll buy a ring from the grocery when I go next.”  
  
“Hermione,” he said. “I’m so sorry, I would never, I didn’t mean-“  
  
“I know,” she said. She took a deep breath, and smelled the sweet spring flowers of his estate. “I know. You’re my friend, Draco, I know you’re not like that. You’ve had opportunity enough to poison me without needing to rely on a thousand year old ring. It’s just, I’m not safe in your house. Your portraits nearly tore themselves off the walls when they saw me, and I have no doubt there are other artifacts imbued with Dark Magic that will hex me if I touch them.”  
  
“I was wrong to bring you here,” he said. “I’ve undone so many hexes I thought it might be possible to return to my childhood, when the manor was open and airy and at peace. I should have known I can’t escape my heritage.”  
  
“How does the stupid ring even know my blood status?” She asked. “It’s not as though there’s anything that intrinsically separates us; we’ve both got magic.” Draco shifted.  
  
“I was always taught that muggle-borns were aberrants who’d gotten their magic by some kind of transmutation of power. Their parents might have, deliberately or not, stolen a Wizarding artifact or conducted a ritual to seize another wizard’s power. Every squib is a wizard whose blood-potential had been grafted onto a muggle.”  
  
“And you think your ring senses this about me?” She asked. “It’s not even true, muggle-borns have squib ancestors, and their magic occasionally resurfaces.”  
  
“I know,” he said. “I don’t know what to tell you.”  
  
“We should get going,” she said. He nodded his head.  
  
“I’m sorry,” he said again.  
  
“It’s a beautiful ring,” she said. “It’s stunning, really. I would have been honored to wear it.”  
  
“I’ll find something else and make sure it’s not hexed,” he said. She wondered about the likelihood that any of his possessions had escaped the curse against the muggle-born.  
  
“Let’s go to Scotland,” she said, and she marched through his front door, avoiding eye contact with any of the portraits, which stared daggers into her back. She retrieved her trunk, checked that she had everything she needed, and found Draco in the green drawing room, the curtains enchanted to look like shed snakeskin. “Your family certainly has an aesthetic,” she said.  
  
“Do you think little too much?” He asked, amusement in his voice. The portkey, a strange figurine of a dancing bear, sat on a teak side table before him.  
  
“I can’t imagine much more,” she responded, and he laughed.  
  
“Are you telling me Weasley doesn’t have his house decked out in red and gold and lions?”  
  
“I don’t think many people lean as heavily on their secondary school allegiance as your family does. What do they do when someone gets put in another house?”  
  
“Oh,” Draco said. “That hasn’t happened in a hundred and fifty years.”  
  
“Really?” She asked.  
  
“The dirty little secret of the sorting hat is that it lets you go into whatever house you truly want, and growing up with a family of Slytherins does tend to make one wish to be a Slytherin. It’s more a divining hat than a sorting hat, really. But surely you know this, weren’t you close to a hatstall?” She was surprised he remembered the Sorting ceremony so well; it had been fourteen years ago, and so much had happened in the intervening space. They hadn't even known each other then.  
  
“It wanted to place me in Ravenclaw,” she said. “But I don’t look good in blue.”  
  
“You look good in everything,” Draco said, flippantly, and he took her hand in his (she hadn’t expected his palm to be calloused, nor his skin so smooth) and together they touched the odd little tchotchke.  
  
She felt the instant nausea of the portkey’s motion, she felt herself jerked upwards by her stomach, and she hung suspended as though on a great hook. Her eyelids peeled back from her eyes and her lips peeled over her teeth and she felt as though her skin were separating from her muscles.  
  
But then her feet touched the ground, and her legs promptly collapsed underneath her. Draco landed upright, and gave her an amused smirk. She chose to ignore it, and she brushed the dust of her landing off her sundress, and looked around herself.  
  
They’d landed about quite close to a little cottage with high gabled windows. Twists of ivy with bright purple flowers climbed up the grey stone walls, and the windows were flung open to invite in the sunlight.  
  
“I haven’t been here in years,” Draco said. He levitated their trunks _wingárdium_ _leviósa_ , and held them above their heads as they climbed up the slight incline and found the door. She met the wards farther out than she expected, and Draco downed them with a flick of his wand, and whispered a password in Latin.  
  
“You use the ecclesiastical pronunciation for your Latin spells?” She asked, mostly joking.  
  
“My father tried to make me learn Classical Latin as a boy,” Draco said. “But I was much more interested in my broomstick. I know my House’s passwords, but little more.”  
  
“I think you’d like it if you knew it,” she said. The gravel path was lined on either side with bright, blooming flowers, the house was surrounded with holly bushes, and she realized that the cottage itself stood in the midst of a great moor, and purple blooming heather roiled like a great ocean all around them, as far as she could see in any direction. Towards the south, she saw a small building which she supposed must be the stables.  
  
“It’s so isolated,” she said.  
  
“There’s a Disillusioned Wizarding town behind that ridge,” he pointed. “It looks like we’re in the wilderness, but it’s actually quite a thriving community. A lot of Wizards up here breed magical creatures. You should see the Pygmy Puff farm.” She thought of Ginny’s bouncing little familiar, and smiled at the image of hundreds hiding beneath the thick heather.  
  
The door swung inwards at their approach, and he navigated their trunks into the house, and set them down in the parlor. It was furnished with cherry wood furniture, and the walls were painted a cheery light yellow. A little fireplace stood in the corner, wood-burning, with a stack of dusty firewood beside it.  
  
Draco flicked his wand, and the dust from the room floated up in a hazy line, and vanished out into the sunlight.  
  
“Alright,” he said. “There’s a bedroom through there, and there ought to be another one-“ he paused, and she saw him contemplating. “Merlin’s balls,” he said.  
  
“What?” She asked. She turned to inspect a portrait above the mantle piece of a blond-haired young wizard and his wife, both dressed in green and distant in expression. The picture was pre-Raphaelite and fluid, vegetative, beguiling. They shifted slightly when she gazed upon them, but they did not meet her eyes.  
  
“I haven’t been here since I was ten or so, and the cottage was so large in my memory. I distinctly remember playing wizard chess in bed at night, but there’s only one room, so I suppose I must have shared with my parents.”  
  
“Well, if the Ministry does decide to audit us, at least it will add a veneer of authenticity to our marriage,” she said. “I’m sure it’ll be no problem.”  
  
“You wouldn’t be scandalized to-“  
  
“Draco Malfoy,” she said. “I slept on the ground for months on end with Harry and Ron. I won’t shrivel up and perish from shame if we have to share a room.”  
  
“Well I’d hate to make you uncomfortable,” he said, and she shook her head.  
  
“It’s no worry, really. It’s nice being away from the world, out amongst the heather in the highlands. I’ve missed Scotland a great deal.”  
  
“The air is cleaner up here,” he said. “I always forget how lovely it is. Shall we walk to the town? Afterwards I can show you the horses.”  
  
“I’d like that,” she said.  
  
———————————————  
  
The road to town had been cut through moorland, and it wended through patches of briar and nettle and cowslip and heather. It was about an hour’s pleasant amble, and as they walked they watched the hares leap to safety, and the broad-winged butterflies slip from flower to flower. Everywhere insects buzzed, and birds sang in the undergrowth, and the blue sky shone rich with sunhaze.  
  
In town, they lunched at a pleasant Wizarding restaurant that served authentic Greek dishes. She tried out her modern Greek on the owner, and the woman was so impressed that she gave them the meal for free, and sent them out the door with a package of fresh-made melomakarona.  
  
They apparated to the stable, and Draco left her to visit with the horses while he reestablished the wards to grant her temporary access. She watched the herd of them grazing contentedly, spread apart and cognizant only of the sweet grass, and she met the groom who rented them out to locals.  
  
Their coats came in varied colors, but tended towards chestnut or dun, and she picked out their leader, a feisty little painted mare who had a gangly-legged foal beside her. She jotted down her notes for her arithmantic calculations, and when the groom offered to saddle up a horse for her, she accepted.  
  
She’d ridden before, on vacation in Spain, or at her step cousin’s house in Tunisia, but she found that knowing magic made her much more in tune with the horse’s movements, and after finding her footing she went cantering through the heather, and rode all the way to town and back.  
  
———————-  
  
She found Draco digging through the basement archives when she finished showering. The area beneath the cottage had been magically enlarged, and stretched far away into either direction, filled with books and papers and cabinets and curiosities.  
  
“What is all this?” She asked.  
  
“A history of my family’s political involvements,” he said. “Ministers poisoned, officials bribed, bills passed, that kind of thing, you understand.” He said it casually, as though every family would have a record of their treasons against the state. She wondered if the Weasleys housed a similar record, somewhere in one of their ancestral homes. “My father was never invited to join the Thaumazdo Faction, in fact, I doubt he knew they existed. The only reason I know is that I happened to catch Duncan Lettier’s secretary while drunk, and she slurred something about needing to set a meeting, before a Fidelius Charm clamped her lips shut. But there can’t be a secret organization that has never had a Malfoy member; there simply aren’t enough pure bloods in England. So, I’m searched for something that will give me a clue.”  
  
“I’ve never read about them,” she said.  
  
“I think I recall Andromeda mentioning something to my mother once, but that could just be wishful thinking. How did you find the horses?”  
  
“They’re amazing,” she said. “I went for a ride, and I’ve made the preliminary notes for my arithmancy. I’m going to continue with that for a spell, and then I’ll start working on my reconstructed charm. It looks to be quite powerful, so I may need someone else to help me cast it.”  
  
“Of course, just let me know.” She smiled, and left him to his research.  
  
She watched the sun set over the moorlands, and she set herself to reviewing the few reconstructed spells she was certain about. There was a Latin protection and fertility spell that had been sung by the whole city of Rome for Lupercalia. It was a communal spell, and it demanded blood-magic and sex-magic. There was Medea’s sleeping spell from the Argonautika, a version of which was still in use for modern dragon breeders, Charlie Weasley had informed her. And there was Lucan’s record of necromancy in the Pharsalia. But she knew no common spells, no ordinary household aids, no love charms, although they appeared frequently enough in the extant literature.  
  
She worked on her arithmancy and, when the moon hung high in the sky, she finally resolved to unpack her few belongings and go to bed.  
  
She found her trunk had been arranged much more neatly, and pulling out her clothes, she realized Deena had altered almost every shirt to be brighter or more ornate or more flattering, and she’d changed Hermione’s jeans by fixing all the tears and turning the denim to cotton. She groaned at this, having forgotten just how much the Wizarding world struggled to understand muggle conventions, but when she reached her underwear, she found that all her sensible garments had been transformed into lingerie that looked to be straight out of the Victorian era, provocative only to someone who’d spent their life ogling table legs, but still obviously intended to seduce.  
  
Worse, her pajamas had been changed into diaphanous gowns and sheer, revealing silk. The absurdity of the situation brought her to laughter, and when Draco came into the room, he found her holding the offending items.  
  
“You don't strike me as a nightgown sort of girl, Granger,” he said.  
  
“Deena transfigured all my clothes,” she said. “She brightened my shirts and ruined my jeans and gave me lingerie that I think my grandmother would find too conservative, and she turned my comfortable St Andrews shirt into this monstrosity.”  
  
She shook the nightdress, and it was so finely spun that it floated through the air.  
  
“Sorry about that,” Draco said. “I’m afraid you’re getting a horrible image of the hospitality of House Malfoy with your stay here. I’ll tell her to turn everything back when we return, or I could summon her here-“  
  
“Don’t worry about it,” Hermione said. “She didn’t mean any harm, and it’s not terribly inconvenient. Besides, she thinks we’re married.”  
  
“Poor Deena’s always done her best,” Malfoy said.  
  
———————————————-  
  
Draco lay on the hard stone floor, feeling a crick developing in his neck. In the bed, Hermione cried out wordlessly, in anguish. He heard and tried to ignore her muffled sobs as he pretended to sleep.


End file.
